Biobanking:A treasure for biomedical scientists

The concept of biobanking has become more important than ever considering the fast pace advancements in the field of genomics.Genomics as we are aware involves intensive efforts to determine the entire DNA sequence of organisms and fine scale genetic mapping efforts.It is a data intensive branch of medicine that uses information about an individual’s genetic makeup to draw conclusions about disease.All this genetic information can be quiet meaningless unless it could be correlated with patient information,environmental data and disease characteristics.This is where biobanking comes into the picture.Biobanks are said to play a critical role in biomedical research and healthcare in future. 
A biobank, also known as a biorepository, is a place that collects, stores, processes and distributes biological materials and the data associated with those materials for research purposes. Typically, those “biological materials” are human biospecimens – such as tissue or blood – and the “data” are the clinical information pertaining to the donor of that biospecimen. A biobank can also include tissues from other animals, cell and bacterial cultures, and even environmental samples. Modern biobank facilities include all the necessary staff and management, ethical and legal oversight, financial systems, storage facilities, laboratories, security systems, and computer information systems to fully implement their operations. Commonly, a biobank also includes extensive modern molecular biology capabilities – such as robotics and automated micro-quantity liquid handling – to isolate and manage the chemical components (such as DNA) from those tissues.

Pharmaceutical, biotech and medical are the main users of biobanks, but disciplines ranging from forensic science to natural history museums will have biorepositories. Larger institutes will have in-house biobanks, but not every small biotechnology company will be able to afford them, so samples are often outsourced to and requested from contract research organisations (CROs). There are also networks of companies associated with a particular area, such as Alzheimer’s, which have dedicated biobanks. In a pharmaceutical or biotechnology environment, biobanks are used to store specimen data in support of clinical trials. A pharmaceutical company will use a biobank in concert with various genomic techniques to identify and validate biomarkers for a population of patients. In a medical research institute, the primary focus of a biobank is to serve Principal Investigators (PIs), which could be clinicians or PhD researchers. Most organizations find biobanks useful for the supporting data they provide for instance information from patient records, such as smoker/non-smoker, disease diagnosis and stage, family genetics, as well as biological assays carried out on the samples, location of storage, whether the material has been thawed and refrozen, whether aliquots have been made and where they are stored, and so on. A robust query tool is then required to allow researchers to interrogate the system based on the supporting information. Inbiomed is an example of a non-profit organisation based in San Sebastián, Spain, that maintains an adult stem cell and primary cell bank.It is capable of storing 10,000 vials and has been running for four years. Scientists here carry out preclinical research work for pharmaceutical use of stem cells. The H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute, an organisation working towards the prevention and treatment of cancer, has established a biobank as part of its Total Cancer Care (TCC) project, which aims to obtain a genetic fingerprint of different tumour types. The TCC biobank has been in existence for two years and holds approximately 26,000 samples, but with the potential to store half a million samples.

  Modern biobanks that support molecular-based research are highly complex in their operations, and often have extensive organizations comprised of individuals with expertise spanning biology and pathology; informatics and information technology infrastructure; laboratory operations; transportation; and law/ethics. Modern biobanks must remain committed to patients’ rights, while simultaneously serving the needs of biomedical researchers.

Biobanking has been tagged as one amongst the “10 ideas changing the world right now”, according to Time magazine. It has been most popular in the field of oncology lodging millions of biological samples from cancer patients. Recognizing the importance of these Biobanks,the National cancer Institute has put in huge amount of money for development of biobank infrastructure and research.